WEEKEND GRAB BAG ~ TIME

Some detail from a book by Robert FitzGerald: Signs of the Times are available via the link. The author divides astrological Ages into more accessible bite-sized chunks called Eras and Phases.

At present we are in transit through the Age of Pisces. By this author's calculation the Aquarius Era of the Pisces Age ran from 1800 to 1980 - which could well account for some astrolgers' insistence that we were already in the Age of Aquarius.

Then, dividing time into even smaller slices, 1950 to 1965 becomes the Aquarius Phase of the Aquarius Era of the Age of Pisces....that slice includes the psychedlic 60s - thought to be quite Aquarian, so with a double dose of Aquarius: phase and era, it was.... with a background of Pisces dreaminess.

1965 to 1980 = Pisces Phase, Aquarius Era, Age of Pisces.

From 1980 to 2160 is the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces and we are presently in the Gemini Phase - 2010 to 2025 of the Pisces Era of the Age of Pisces.

The Cancer Phase will be 2025 to 2040.

For a brief rundown on what this means, and comparisons with similar eras and phases throughout history, do take a look at the website, linked above.

All that can really be said is that at some indeterminate point in the very distant past, for reasons unknown, there came the moment known to science as t = 0. We were on our way.
(Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.10)

From http://www.timephysics.com/

MEASURING TIME

Be it money, weight, a piece of estate, speed, distance or resistance. We measure by comparison to a standard that we have defined. When we measure a mass we use a standard mass like KG or LB for comparison. Distances we measure using a standard of length like a meter yard or feet. Keeping the above in mind let us think how we measure motion. We use time to measure motion i.e. Feet per second or miles per hour. This provides a hint that when dealing with time we are actually dealing with some standard of motion.

We may have made the concept of time more complicated then what it really is. Measurement of time started early on in human development. There are plenty of clues in every language in the greetings and the meetings. Time of the day is related to the position of sun in the sky or its absence thereof. There is dawn, sunrise, early morning, morning, mid morning, noon, afternoon, late afternoon, evening, sunset, dusk, night and mid night. Then there are years, months, weeks, based on earth’s yearly orbit around the sun and the changing seasons. The use of units like seconds and minutes which are radial angle measurements in geometry points toward the original connection of time measurements to radial motion of astronomical objects across the sky. Once we started using clocks, watches, and then digital time we got completely disconnected from the original method of measurement and time developed a life of its own.

The problem of time may be easy to solve if we go back to the original concept of sun moving across the sky. When we measure the speed of a car, we are just comparing its motion to the motion of the hands of the clock and also indirectly to the fractional motion of sun across the sky. We are not measuring speed with something abstract called time we are just comparing a known motion (of the sun) with an unknown motion of the car.

Time is making fools of us again. ~J.K. Rowling

One from a list of crazy watches;
Relativity watch
Modeled on Einstein's theory of relativity, this Relativity Watch actually makes the numbers move instead of the hands. This, of course, makes you dizzy if you continuously stare at it for more than 12 hours.

(A thought: The movement of this watch somehow seems more akin to the movement of the planets.)

Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.
— Dave Barry

The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.

Time is a wealth of change,
but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time
like dew on the tip of a leaf.

(Rabindranath Tagore).